Posts tagged ‘design’

I recently had the opportunity to visit Google at Ann Arbor Michigan to speak with Kristoffer Sorensen about many great and powerful Google secrets – ok, there really wasn’t any secrets; but, it was still informative and entertaining. We did talk about several things; but, the one I’d like to talk about is Google+ Pages.

Disclaimer: I wanted to name them Fluffy Samurai Bunnies of BBQ Death but they said that FSBBBBQD wasn’t sexy enough.

By now most everyone who is involved with Google+ has either seen or owns a Google Plus Page. Have you thought about what you could really do with it though? Have you sat down with your Teddy Chipper Wood Chipper and sliced apart these pages into happy little bits? Probably not since at first glance they do seem kind of boring at face value. Since you haven’t tossed Google+ Pages into the ole creative wood chipper and turned them into mulch for your latest brand identity project then open your minds and prepare to have some creamy nougatty goodness poured directly into them.

For the purposes of illustration I’m going to make up a fictional product owned by 42wd Publishing.

The Morning Meeting

Google+ Twittering

I expect to be reading in all the various Negative Nancy articles about Google+ of how it’s copying Twitter now. Well perhaps Google Plus is, in a way, but a good idea is a good idea. Just ask Facebook about all the things they’ve copied from Google+, Twitter, MySpace and some of the other outside of the U.S. social networks they’ve copied from.

Does Google Plus Need Hashtags?

The short answer is no, Google+ does not need hashtagging. The Search Google+ box does just fine. That being said, I still think it’s good idea. Makes it a lot easier to find topic chains and has the potential to inspire some people to dig deeper in the topic chain.

How Does Google+ Hashtags Benefit a Designer?

Internally, perhaps it doesn’t benefit a designer inside of a typical company. Outside though, now that’s a completely different situation.

Here’s a what if

You have a project that you’re sharing publicly through Google+. You want a way to not only keep it organized but a way for those folks who have you circled to be able dig down deeper and follow your topic thread. Even better, someone new comes along and thinks your project is just the ultimate spiffy wow. Now, instead of using one of the alternative methods all they have to do is click on the #hashtag and they can follow the topic chain you’ve conveniently set up for them.

So no, Google Plus doesn’t need Twitter style hashtagging but it’s a damn good idea and very useful.

Update: Got word from Altay Akgun that the hashtag link conversion doesn’t work on the iPhone ap. You can still use the hashtagging like targeted keywords for the iPhone ap though.

I’d like to say that the music for the above presentations is pretty kick ass. The team that put it together did an excellent job designing the marketing presentation of the new dynamic templates for Google’s Blogger. The beauty of the presentation doesn’t eclipse the beauty of the new Blogger dynamic templates but it does neglect to mention that there’s not a whole lot you can do with it.

Designers bare a curse. It’s the curse of invisibility, well sort of. Most designers have to fight tooth and nail to get the resources they need. Then they are often relegated to obscurity. Until –

That is until there is a bad design. What defines a bad design can often be as ambiguous as what defines a good design. You can follow all the design principles you want and still end up with a bad design because the users don’t think it’s a good design. When it’s a bad design a designer hears all about it and the change to the design has to be near instantaneous.

The question, though, who really pays for bad design? Of course the designer gets flack for not magically knowing what should and shouldn’t be in the design, what it should and shouldn’t do, and so forth. The developer gets flack if the functionality doesn’t follow the design or breaks the design. The project leader / manager gets flack because they didn’t know the design was going to break. Well, you get the point. The things is, even with all the flack flying around these aren’t the people who are paying for the bad design. Users pay for bad design.

As I write this I’m attending the Mobile JavaScript Summit and unfortunately I can’t give it the glowing recommendation that I gave CSS Summit 2011. While I left CSS Summit 2011 feeling educated I can’t say I feel as such with Mobile JavaScript Summit. Unfortunately, it felt more like the majority of the speakers were pimping their particular product. I understand that they need to do so but I really expected to see some good coding.

Who was Informative

Josh Clark provided some very good information about The New Rules of Designing for Touch.

Steven Gill moderately pimped PhoneGap but he did it in an informative and useful way – and he was entertaining.

Marc Grabanski really showed some of the power of jQuery Mobile. I thought he did an excellent job of giving voice to the wonderful things jQuery Mobile can do.

This is just my observation but it seemed that there was a lot of down playing of jQuery Mobile. It’s really to bad because out of all the offerings it is the only one that I saw that was capable of graceful degradation across multiple browsers and multiple platforms.

Don’t take my word for it though, one of the products might be the right one for what you’re trying to do. Check out the site here.

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When you are lighting your patio the exact opposite thing you need to do is to be stumbling over electrical lines and attempting to put lights close to an outlet to connect them to. Assuming, notwithstanding, you ran with solar lights you wouldn’t have this issue. Solar lights take their power from the sun, store ...

AwesomeWeb is the latest freelance job site to enter the market. It is a “marriage” of the teams behind 1stWebDesigner and IncomeDiary. They claim AwesomeWeb is an attractive alternative to the existing freelance job sites out there. How? By matching a select group of web designers and developers to higher quality projects. In theory, it [...] The post New […]

Today we’re giving you a sneak peek inside our “Anatomy Of A $9,750 Website Build.” This will give you an opportunity to see actual lessons from the training we have available. These previews will each feature an entire lesson from the training, including everything you’ll get when you sign up. We hope this will give you a [...] The post Client Interaction F […]